Hummer Conquers Red Tape On Way To Troops

WARREN, MICH. — A few weeks from now, without fanfare, the U.S. Army will end an era. The first replacements for the venerable jeep will roll into the ranks of the 9th Infantry Division.

To the innocent eye, this son of jeep, which the Army calls the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle and everyone else involved calls Hummer, will make a simple journey by rail from a factory in Mishawaka, Ind., to the troops at Fort Lewis, Wash.

But following the Pentagon's bureaucratic road map, the Hummer will travel by Form DD250 from TACOM to FORSCOM, concluding a journey begun 45 years ago when the Army first dreamed of a jeep successor.

Hummer's odyssey in the past few years has included such exotic landmarks as TRADOC and AMCCOM and DCSRDA, CECOM and MICOM and OTEA, DCSOPS and AMSAA and CAC. Overseeing all this were, among innumerable others, the TSM and the FISO and the flinty-eyed DASC.

If all of that boggles and baffles, at least one thing about Hummer is clear: The staggering bureaucratic maze through which even a relatively simple weapon system must travel to reach the field.

Sixty-three agencies and military commands, from the Army Soldier Support Center to the Air Force Air Weather Service, had to be notified when the Pentagon officially blessed Hummer's creation in 1980.

That does not begin to include others involved from such provinces of officialdom as the Small Business Administration, the Treasury Department and a dozen congressional committees.

Collectively, they fashioned a vehicle that is, not surprisingly, bigger, heavier, faster and more expensive than the jeep.

Defenders of the Pentagon's buying system argue that just because a bureaucracy is big does not necessarily mean it is bad.

Hummer, they point out, is about to reach the troops, almost on schedule. Independent auditors agree that the vehicle appears to be a commendable improvement over its predecessors, despite dozens of nettlesome glitches during development, from faulty brakes to fractured axles.

What Hummer shows, however, is what kind of customer the defense industry must deal with, and how contorted even the straightforward has become in the arms business.

The process of fielding a new weapon is so ponderous that it took 20 years to develop a new tank, and the Army still is looking for an effective, light, anti-tank weapon after a string of false starts.

There is nothing revolutionary in Hummer's technology. It uses basic, off- the-shelf American automotive know-how. Even so, the $1.2 billion program has had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of military midwives lending a hand in Hummer's birth, all on the public payroll.

The Army's burgeoning bureaucracy is partly self-inflicted and partly imposed by congressional watchdogs. The service now has more officers than it had officers and enlisted men combined when the jeep was born in 1938.

Capt. Edwin Messinger is an expert on Hummer, both the vehicle and the bureaucracy that houses it like a garage.

He can explain, for instance, that he is a TRASSO, a TRADOC systems staff officer, and that TRADOC is the Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Va., which thinks of itself as the ''user representative'' during the development of new weapons.

That is not to be confused with the ''material developer,'' Messinger continued, which is the Army Materiel Command, or AMC.

AMC, after long and thoughtful study, changed its name to DARCOM (U.S. Army Materiel Development and Readiness Command) in 1976 and then, after more long and thoughtful study, changed it back to AMC last year.

But Messinger, the TRASSO, is not the user representative. That job falls to the TRADOC system manager, or TSM (pronounced ''tism''), at Fort Benning, Ga. Sensing befuddlement, Messinger reaches for an example to illustrate the flow chart.

''Let's say a lug wrench on the vehicle is unacceptable to the user because it's too heavy,'' he says. The TSM will be the first to complain.

If all parties involved agree that the lug wrench is too heavy, a report is prepared, approved by the commanding general and sent to the Pentagon.

There, the Force Integrating Staff Officer, or FISO, leaps into action. ''He's the guy who ties it all together in DA Department of the Army,'' Messinger said.

''Obviously,'' Messinger said, ''we've got a lot of people out there answering to constituencies that want to know if the money is being spent wisely.''

Equally obvious is the complexity implied when the micromanagement revealed by this theoretical lug wrench is extrapolated to an entire weapon system.

And the alphabet soup of acronyms pertinent to Hummer hardly hints at the breadth of bureaucracy involved in a system simultaneously building 170 kinds of weapons, many infinitely more complex than a latter-day jeep.

Messinger said he thinks that the system of checks and balances catches more problems than it causes. But it also means hundreds of people up and down the chain are buried in paperwork when someone at the top asks a question.